The world has had enough of Western pseudo-morality

Donald Trump’s first decisions have planted a big nail into the coffin of the United Nations and Wilsonian idealism. They anchor the return of international relations not to the 20^th or even the 19^th century, but to the 18^th century, when powers waged ceaseless wars of conquest in a world that was regulated neither by the 19^th century’s beloved “concert of nations” nor by the League of Nations and the United Nations sought by American presidents after the First World War.
  With his withdrawal from the World Health Organisation, but above all with his demand to incorporate Canada, Panama and Greenland into the USA, Trump is not only giving the death knell to the human and international law that has been painstakingly established since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, but also to the international order created by his predecessor Woodrow Wilson in 1918. Alongside these ambitions, Putin with his border war in Ukraine and Netanjahu with his annexation of the Golan Heights and his massacres in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria only play a subordinate role.
  The idealism, the fight for democracy, the “values”, human rights and other moral claims that formed the basis of international relations for a hundred years are over. The liberal, moralistic and universalistic 20^th century of the Western mould has just come to an end. The neo-liberal, globalist expansion under American aegis after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was its swan song. After initial successes, the operation turned into a fiasco and Trump is trying to draw the consequences.
  So, the real 21^st century has only just begun: It will be protectionist, revolve around regional powers, civilisational poles, as Samuel Huntington would say, and be multipolar, as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and the BRICS+ would say. These poles will compete for control of resources and markets and will sometimes be in conflict with each other. Their relations will be interest-led and transactional. This is not necessarily bad for world peace, because the moral order that the West supposedly defends has gradually become toxic and intolerable for other nations, which are turning away in disgust from being shamelessly instrumentalised.
  But let’s rewind the film to better distinguish the individual sequences.

From the Ancien Régime
to the French Revolution
and the Congress of Vienna …

Henry Kissinger described very well in his “Diplomacy” how, after the terrible religious wars, the monarchies of the Ancien Régime, although they concentrated on increasing their power, waged wars that were limited by aristocratic codes of honour (“Gentlemen from England, shoot first …”) and marriages between princes.
  This was followed abruptly by the French Revolution and Napoleon, which introduced the idea of ideological war, waged in the name of the peoples’ right to the blessings of revolution and liberation from monarchical oppression, and that of total war, which mobilised hundreds of thousands of armed citizens and all available economic resources.
  The Congress of Vienna was an attempt to create a new, more stable order. The four victorious powers and France, which had become a monarchy again, agreed on a so-called “balance of powers”, which was conservatively orientated, and a conflict resolution mechanism based on the convening of major conferences in the event of a serious conflict – the famous “concert of nations”. The system guaranteed relative peace for a century, until the rise of Germany, its ill-advised ambitions and the gradual formation of coercive alliances and counter-alliances led, as it were mechanically, to disaster at the first spark – the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

… to the League of Nations
 and the UN

In order to prevent this return to chaos, Wilson proposed his idea of collective security, which was to be embodied by a League of Nations whose task would be to punish the warmongers and prevent them from doing what they were doing, focusing in particular on democracy, transparency, arms control, the right of peoples to self-determination and sanctions for breaches of the rules.
  A morally impeccable project, but one that was never actually realised. On the one hand, it was easy for the USA to propose these new norms, as they had just genocided their Indian population, snatched Texas and its southern provinces from Mexico, bought Alaska and annexed Hawaii and Puerto Rico without the slightest moral scruple. All this while refusing to take responsibility by renouncing participation in the League of Nations. For their part, the Europeans, whose four empires – the Russian, Austrian, German and Ottoman – had disintegrated into myriads of units and ethnicities that were difficult to integrate into nation states without historical consistency, found themselves confronted with an impossible task.
  The League of Nations experiment therefore quickly floundered, leading to the catastrophe of 1939 and, in 1945, the founding of a new structure, the UN, which was to adopt the principle of collective security without the shortcomings of its predecessor. The system did not work too badly at first. It succeeded in keeping the bridges open during the Cold War and accommodating the new states that had emerged from decolonisation. Just as the Concert of Nations was unable to resist German pressure in the 19^th century, it was unable to resist the American hegemonism that followed the disappearance of the Soviet countervailing power. Today, it is incapable of giving the emerging powers of the present – China, Russia, but also India, Brazil, Africa and other nations that are claiming their place at the table of power – an appropriate place. With its majority of three out of five permanent members on the Security Council, the West continues to have a disproportionate influence on global governance.
  Add to this the fact that it has systematically betrayed the values on which it supposedly bases its policy – democracy, human rights, the rule of law, etc. – while preventing itself from negotiating with its opponents on the pretext that it is not talking to the devil. This makes it even easier to understand why this supposedly “rules-based” world order has become outdated and even offensive to the majority of humanity.

Return to a brutal form of Realpolitik

By returning to a brutal form of Realpolitik, by distrusting NATO (remember Kissinger, who said that every alliance is inevitably directed against someone and brings war in the long run), by concluding with the moralism and impotence of Wilsonian and UN multilateralism, Trump is trying to put the US back at the centre of the game by freeing it from the collective shackles that it itself helped to build.
  The Europeans, who had struggled with Wilson’s principles and idealism, are now the last to believe in them. They even cling to it with an iron grip, refusing to negotiate with the evil Russians in Ukraine and hypocritically turning a blind eye to the abuses of their Israeli protégés in Palestine.
  It is not certain that history will prove them right. •

(Translation Current Concerns)

* Guy Mettan is a journalist and member of the Grand Council of the Canton of Geneva, where he presided in 2010. He worked for “Journal de Genève”, Le Temps stratégique, Bilan, “Le Nouveau Quotidien”, and later as director and editor-in-chief of “Tribune de Genève”. In 1996, he founded the Swiss Press Club, of which he was president and later director from 1998 to 2019.